Laughter and tears: Why do I feel sad sometimes when I laugh?

In general: Do not be afraid of your tears. Refusing to embrace your shadow is refusing to accept your humanity. It never ends well.

In particular: Laughing and crying are very closely related. You cannot stimulate one without stimulating the other. Laughing and crying engage the same set of muscles, only with different contractions: laughing is faster, and crying is slower. If you want to free one, you need to free the other. Said differently, you will only go as far with your laughter as you are willing to embrace and free your tears. The only way to fully feel your joy is to fully feel your grief.

Accept Life as it is. All of it. Denying the inevitable doesn’t make it less inevitable. You cannot open up your box of emotions selectively and only choose to let the laughter and joy out. Your body doesn’t work like that. Emotions are illogical, irrational and unreasonable. When they want to come out, they simply do.

It doesn’t happen very often, but it does occasionally happen. Eventually you (and everybody else) will have to resist the urge to cry at the end of a laughter session.

Don’t feel embarrassed or out of place when it happens. Better still: let yourself cry and allow others to do the same. If someone ever starts to cry and can’t stop in one of your sessions, let them be. It will naturally end sooner or later. Don’t touch them and above all do not try to comfort them. Allow them to process whatever they need to process. A good cry feels often better than a good laugh, and you don’t have to know nor explain why you are crying. It is perfectly normal and unavoidable.

Energetically laughter stimulates the heart meridian while crying stimulates the lung meridian. Traditional Chinese medicine associates all the muscles of the respiratory system (including the lungs) with unexpressed sadness, unshed tears.

A few words about tears

Crying is a more complicated process than one would at first imagine. First of all, there are really three different types of tears. Basal tears keep our eyes lubricated constantly. Reflex tears are produced when our eyes get irritated, like with onions or when something gets into our eyes. The third kind of tear is produced when the body reacts emotionally to something. Each type of tear contains different amounts of chemical proteins and hormones. Scientists have discovered that the emotional tears contain higher levels of manganese and the hormone prolactin, and this contributes in a reduction of both of these in the body; thus helping to keep depression away. Many people have found that crying actually calms them after being upset, and this is in part due to the chemicals and hormones that are released in the tears.

When emotions affect us, the nervous system stimulates the cranial nerve, in the brain and this sends signals to the neurotransmitters to the tear glands. Thus, we cry .The largest tear gland, the lacrimal gland produces the tears of emotion and reflex. Many believe that the body, in times of emotional stress, depends on this gland to release excess amounts of chemicals and hormones, returning it to a stable state.

We need both laughter and tears to help us function in society. Crying relieves stress, reduces hormone and chemical levels in the body, and helps us return to a calm state. Laughter relieves stress, stimulates healing, exercises certain parts of the body, and helps in human bonding. That is why crying and laughing are beneficial to us both emotionally and physically.

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Sebastien Gendry is a speaker, trainer and consultant, expert in laughter for wellness and wellbeing. He played a major role in introducing Laughter Therapy in North America, Russia, Palestine and other countries, inspired the creation of 100s of Laughter Clubs worldwide, and is the creator of the Laughter Wellness method. He has been offering a variety of laughter programs every year on three to four continents for the past decade and continues to do so.